That made sense. This isn't really a reply. I was just reading from Gods, Demons and Symbols of Ancient Mesopotamia: An Illustrated Dictionary and they describe a bunch of Babylonian magical rituals, and it was neat, but I don't know anyone other than you who might find it interesting. So here we go.

Patients wore amulets inscribed with incantations. So humans thought that putting words onto objects gave them powers. When we look look at words the meaning is very rapidly and involuntarily available to us, so it kind of makes sense that they'd associate "safe child delivery" with an amulet that said "safe child delivery", but that's still kind of crazy. I wonder if that kind of causal attribution to inscriptions is implicitly going on when people get tattoos that say "strength" or other virtues in the modern era.

Incantations: The Babylonians had troves of memorized spells and narratives with various powers, some taken from other cultures like the Akkadians and Sumerians. The cool part is, the incantations were eventually classified by the Babylonians according to which demons they addressed. They had a demonic nosology! So of course people in ancient times could classify different diseases according to clusters of symptoms, just like now. It's just when they got done making their diagnosis, the name they gave to the disease belonged to an ethereal soul of darkness who needed to be scared away. I totally forgot to write about exorcisms in my last comment on the folk psychology of cleanliness.

Anyway, the first incantation a Babylonian magician would incant was usually a shout-out to their favorite god, in order to identify the magician as an agent of the Light so the demon wouldn't attack the magician while the magician was dispelling whatever misfortune or ailment they had been contracted to deal with. Not surgical masks, not latex gloves. Just name-drop your city's patron deity and everything should be fine. Which is to say, humans gain unjustified courage against disease and risk from just thinking about their imagined protectors. Like the tattoo hypothesis, this is testable. Do people make less severe judgment about existential risk after donating to MIRI?

Luck: Primitive people thought bad luck was a disease, just like polio or hay fever, and the Babylonians had methods intended to deal with it. Surpu was a catch all ritual for anyone who's life sucked more than usual. Sleeplessness, constant worrying, convulsing, and foaming at the mouth, Surpu could handle them all. First you call out all of yours sins, hoping that the related offense will be among them. Interestingly, you call out your oaths, even if you didn't break them, because even oaths you intend to honor are powerful devices of cosmic magic that can awaken the forces of chaos. Humans really overestimate the power of language it seems, which is probably half the reason that contractualism and honoring one's word actually influence peoples' behavior, rather than any explicitly reasoned game theoretic considerations.

So, you call out your sins and oaths, and then you throw things into a fire. Maybe you have a branch that you can strip into pieces or a reed mat you can unravel. Toss that in, all the while the magician is saying his incantations which are counter sins. So not only do humans want to make up for the bad things we do, but we want to make up for them individually with sin-appropriate penances. Then the fire is extinguished and the sins have gone away. Which kind of poetic, but also a little sad when you think about some Babylonian woman with seizures whose husband just paid to see someone make a fire and burn some goat wool.

Another ritual, namburbu, was intended for protection against future evils. This ritual is much more elaborate. First separate the patient from the outside world in a hut or a magic circle. Just making a line on the ground makes people think that the space enclosed has different properties. Categorization has consequences. Then use some flowers or incense for a nice scent, sweep the floors, and maybe they kill a goat. Whatever it takes to make the ritual space clean. I don't know why animal sacrifice makes things clean, since people avoid animal corpses. Maybe something about life being sacred and taking a life is...I don't know. That's a different chapter of the book I haven't gotten to. Next there's some music with drums or bells. I don't know anything about the folk psychology of music, unfortunately. I really should though, since music is so rich a source of aesthetic experience: understanding its origins and cognitive processing covers a non trivial portion of human preference, which is a non trivial portion of human morality, which is non trivial. Then the magician makes offerings to a river god. Not only do people bathe in rivers, but rivers carry away human feces. If I were making cleansing rituals in ancient times, I would definitely include some rivers, and not just pools of water for bathing. That's a lovely association to use. Carrying away sin, not just dissolving it. Then the magician makes reference to the thing that gets protection, putting their hands on a patient's body, on the walls of a house, or on a effigy if the thing being blessed isn't accessible. Speaking of effigy, the Babylonians also burned statues of sorcerers and sorceress. Combine that with anecdotes I've heard about tribal cultures being scared of cameras, with Judaism having a commandment against the worship of idols, with Islam not even allowing depictions of Muhammad, with voodoo dolls, and with some Anabaptists I know who won't play with a standard deck of playing cards or watch television because of the images of people (however, they play of mean game of Uno), and I think it's also fair to say people grossly overestimate the power of displayed faces. That's super duper weird.